Page:In a winter city, by Ouida.djvu/353

 roots: she was full of a restless, dissatisfied humility; there were times when she hated herself, and was weary of herself to utter impatience. She shut herself up with her art studies and the old frescoes, because they pained her less than any other thing. She was passionately unhappy: though to other people she only seemed a trifle more cynical and more contemptuous than before, no more.

The easy morality with which her cousin would have solved all difficulty, was not possible to her. She would not have cheated the old dead man from whom her riches came, by evading him in the spirit of his will whilst adhering to the letter. Unless she gave up her riches, her lover could be nothing to her: and the thought of giving them up never even occurred to her as possible. She did not know it, because she was so very tired of so many things; but the great world she had always lived in was very necessary to her, and had absolute dominion over her; it became tiresome, as the trammels of empire do to a monarch; but to lay down her sceptre would have been an abdication, and an